Books 2014 - Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

[byslantedlight]

As he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe's enigmatic wife allow her to remain?

This book was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2012, and I thought it would make a nice contrast, having read the light fluffy The Longest Holiday, and various YA stories before that. It would surely be well-written, I would feel the characters, and the hills above Nice, and it would be a good think-y read. Profound and thrilling, Swimming Home reveals how the most devastating secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves says the blurb, and I do like strange and new things.

Swimming Home really just reminded me though that there's a reason I rarely read books that have been nominated for the big literary awards! They might make us think, but they invariably seem to do so by also making us feel rather grubby and depressed, and reminding us that people are shits to each other, from one end of life to another. So not why I read - you can see and feel all that out there in real life!

I don't read books just to feel good, or only as light entertainment etc., but I think that what I do want from any book, however bleak the subject matter, is some kind of redeeming hope in people and the world, some message, however briefly spotted, that it's all worth going on with. I really couldn't find that message in Swimming Home, for all that there were some vivid lines and thoughts in it that I liked. Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely says Kitty Finch in the story more than once, and so the fact that, while everyone in the story may technically "get home", as witnessed by the really irritating plot device of cutting off the the story at its climax, and then fast-forwarding 15 years or so and letting us know, may technically be true, they don't at all seem to be "safe" even if they've recovered enough to keep plodding on, and that only suggests to me that, by Kitty's words, life really isn't worth living then...

Not quite the feeling I want from my holiday reading challenge!

Key West, USA - The Longest Holiday by Paige Toon
Nice, France - Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

Comments

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

I'd be curious to go right back to whoever coined the term "literary fiction" and find out exactly what they were talking about and in what context - I strongly expect they did it in a sniffy kind of way, and suddenly people had something to call themselves that sounded better than just "an author" when they wanted to think of themselves as a cut above other authors...

I suppose I can understand if someone writes a story that just happens to be set in a science fiction world, but they don't feel that the science fiction is the focus - but I don't see why they'd object to be called science fiction by people who didn't know have their authorial intent behind it, that makes no sense! I think it was Atwood who was particularly sniffy about being called SF... as you say, bizarre... Surely it should be just fabulous enough to know that hundreds and thousands and more people are going to read your story and enjoy it!

[caffyolay.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure the term 'literary fiction' is that old. I don't remember it from my youth for certain. Books were books. I wonder if it was termed to differentiate themselves from genre fiction, on the basis that they considered their writing to be more serious, and thus more worthwhile, than for instance sci-fi or crime yarns. The term certainly has the whiff of snobbery about it to me. Genre fiction is also hugely popular and I suspect there may be some resentment of that fact.

Yes, I think you're right, it was Atwood. And I agree, she should be thrilled and delighted that her book has reached a far wider audience than it might otherwise have done.

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

I can't really think when the term "literary fiction" seemed to pop up, but then I tend to assume that I just don't hear about things for ages and ages... In my head I don't hear it in the eighties, but I did hear in in the nineties. That could have just been me, but...

I went googling, and found an interesting definition by Neal Stephenson, quoted in wiki: while any definition will be simplistic there is a general cultural difference between literary and genre fiction, created by who the author is accountable to. Literary novelists are typically supported by patronage via employment at a university or similar institutions, with the continuation of such positions determined not by book sales but by critical acclaim by other established literary authors and critics. Genre fiction writers seek to support themselves by book sales and write to please a mass audience. So according to that it's got nothing really to do with the writing itself, but is defined by who effectively pays for the writing, and the power they have to call it "good"... Interesting...